Spike Jonze’s Music Video for Arcade Fire’s ‘The Suburbs’

One of my favorite bands currently working (okay, of all-time) is Arcade Fire. My knowledge of music past 1970 isn’t that great (there’s a reason I write about movies here and not music for our sister site OneThirtyBPM). It doesn’t do much for me past that time, so for me to connect to any modern group as deeply as I connect to them says something about their ability to speak to me. And now their latest album The Suburbs, released in August, has received a music video for its first and title track, directed by none other than Spike Jonze. The band and the filmmaker have had a working relationship in the past, with a partially acoustic version of their song “Wake Up” used in both trailers and TV spots for his 2009 film Where the Wild Things Are, as well as apparently having worked on a sci-fi b-movie short together, and I would guess that this is either an excerpt from it or at least has some relation to the project.

So what is this? It acts both as a music video and a short film (although that could be said of many music videos), and it shows kids around fifteen years old in a suburb community playing before things…take an unexpected turn. I’ll leave it at that, only wondering what exactly the meaning of it all is. It seems like there’s a lot of story in-between the edits, and whether or not this will be explained in a potential follow-up is still anybody’s guess. As it stands, I liked it quite a bit and think it’s worth a look. And even if you don’t like the video, it’s an excuse to hear this great song again.

What did you think of this video? Are you a fan of Arcade Fire or Spike Jonze?